Japanese Princess Postpones Wedding That Forced Her to Give Up Royal Title

Some things just don’t work out as planned. The job fell through, or the marriage does, or worse. What do you do? Inwardly mourn the thing, of course. Outwardly? You get your story straight, and tell your inner circle, and then you text it to the next circle (the ones who’d be invited to your wedding, but not your birthday dinner), and they tell everyone else that should know. You can follow all that with a Facebook post or a tweet to your followers and high-school acquaintances. Voilà. The painful thing is out in the world. You don’t have to explain what happened to anyone anymore.

Princess Mako, the eldest child of Japan’s Prince Akishino, is royal, so when she decided not to move forward with her marriage, she wrote a press release, in addition to a lot of text messages, probably. The princess, 26, was planning to marry a graduate student, Kei Komuro, whom she met during a study-abroad event in college (though the event was in Tokyo, so it was not a romance sparked by the thrill of a new country). She faced a choice we all know and understand fully because we watched The Crown all the way through twice: by choosing to marry a commoner, she was forced to give up her royal title, and lose all of the privileges that it affords. She’d ditch the crown and marry this guy, a future lawyer, and live happily ever after, just with far fewer tiaras and perhaps dinner obligations. (Though it’s unlikely she’d be queen anyway. Because Japanese royalty only applies to men, that title will pass on to her little brother, Prince Hisahito of Akishino.)

But it didn’t work out that way. They decided not to marry at present “because of our immaturity,” she said in the statement. “[W]e just regret it,” the release continued. “I wish to think about marriage more deeply and concretely and give sufficient time to prepare our marriage and for after the marriage . . . We feel extremely sorry for causing great trouble and further burden to those who have willingly supported us.” They were to marry November 2018, but now they set their sights on 2020, following April 2019, when Emperor Akihito will formally abdicate. (The ghost of Wallis Simpson is watching this one closely in some not-too-distant realm).